Through the advancement of technology, media content is finding its way into homes by various non-traditional means. For instance, with the advent of broadband data connections, media content is now being supplied to homes via the Internet and other digital distribution sources as well as the traditional means of television and radio broadcasts. In addition, home networking standards such as HAVi and wired and wireless protocols such as IEEE 1394, IEEE 802.11, ultra wide band (UWB), cellular and pager networks and Bluetooth now allow a variety of different media consumption devices to communicate via a home network. Thus, media content received at a home can be distributed via a home network for display on any of the media consumption devices connected to the home network.
These advancements in home networking and media content delivery mechanisms provide users with enhanced access to media content, but also present new challenges for measuring the consumption of media content. More specifically, conventional media consumption meters are typically configured to measure media signals consumed in a particular format by a specific type of media consumption device. For example, television content consumption is measured using meters adapted to measure signals formatted for television. Likewise, computer content consumption is measured using meters adapted to measure signals formatted for a computer. Although this approach works well for media consumption devices that are not networked together, it does not allow for media consumption measurement in a home networked environment because of the manner in which media content is transmitted via a home network. Specifically, a home network typically comprises a variety of media consumption devices that are networked together and that are each adapted to process media provided in a particular format. To enable communication between the networked devices, home networks include one or more transcoders that transcode or convert media content signals transmitted via the home network between the various signal formats required by the networked devices. For example, a typical home network may be configured to include a television coupled to a computer with a transcoder disposed between the television and the computer. Media content that is received at the television and then selected for viewing at the computer is converted by the transcoder from a television format to a computer format so that the media content received at the television can be processed for display/viewing at the computer.
Unfortunately, the format conversion process performed by home network transcoders to enable communication between dissimilar devices also causes the corruption or loss of valuable audience measurement data. More specifically, data that enables media consumption measurement is embedded into media content by media content providers. The data is then extracted by media content consumption meters for use in determining the identity of the media content as well as other information about the media content which can then be reported for purposes of measuring consumption of that media content. However, home network transcoders are not adapted to convert this embedded data into a format suitable for use by downstream consumption measuring devices and, as a result, the embedded data is either stripped from the media content or corrupted during the transcoding process. Consequently, consumption of the converted media content cannot be accurately measured.